Tarnation
“Your greatest creation is the life you lead”
Synopsis
Jonathan Caouette's documentary explores his upbringing with his mother, who lived with schizophrenia. The film is composed of various materials collected over 19 years, including snapshots, Super-8 footage, answering machine messages, video diaries, and early short films.
Credits
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How many hands made this film
The scale of the collaboration
Principal cast & crew: 13
These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.
Why a floor?
This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.
Craft leads on file
Edited by Jonathan CaouetteScored by Max Avery Lichtenstein
Box Office
2003 · Box office
💰 Box-office hit — grossed 5330× its budget
Why 2.5×?
Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).
Worldwide gross
$1.2M
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Cast & Crew
13 unique people credited
Top billed cast
Directors
1Writers
1Producers
2Other crew
3Parents Guide
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Where to watch
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Gallery
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